CFML, Clojure, Software Design, Frameworks and more...

June 20, 2014 · By Sean Corfield ·

I've become increasingly frustrated with blogging software. I use MangoBlog here. I used BlogCFC before that. I used WordPress before that (a long time ago - but I've worked with it for a few friends more recently). I just don't enjoy using any of it. Back in January, I toyed with the idea of using my Google+ account for blogging but that hasn't really worked out - because I don't much like Google+, even with all its improvements since I last tried using it. So I'm starting a new blog that doesn't need software to publish anything!

I'll keep this site running since there's a lot of legacy material here that is heavily linked but I won't be posting here any more. I'll probably add redirects to the new blog (with a link back here for Google-friendliness). The new blog probably won't have any CFML stuff on it since, well, I don't really do that any more. I'm still committed to maintaining and enhancing FW/1 - Framework One so don't worry about that but my blog is not really the best place for announcements about that: I'll continue to post to the mailing list and Twitter, and I'll probably set up a I have also set up framework-one.github.io as a blog and documentation site now that I've seen how seancorfield.github.io is going to work.

June 07, 2014 · By Sean Corfield ·

Update June 9th, 2014: Ray Camden used my list of "dead" CFML blogs to prune the feed on coldfusionbloggers.org down to just 146 active blogs. I'm going to leave the old list (of 680 blogs) up for a while then I'll update it and rewrite this blog post to reflect the changes. This will give folks on the "dead" list a chance to look at their blog and decide whether to add it back or not.

Back in March 2013, Adam Cameron posted a list of CFML blogs that he follows, asking the community to comment with additional blogs they followed. The comment thread kinda went off in a different direction but it is an interesting discussion nonetheless that would be grist for several blog posts on other topics. A month later, he posted about a new CFML blog and it made me wonder what had happened to a lot of the "old guard" of CFML bloggers. I thought it might make an interesting blog post to take a look at the blogs of a number of formerly very active members of the CFML community and see what they are up to these days.

I started doing the process manually, based on the list of feeds on coldfusionbloggers.org and after a while I just ran out of steam so I put the project aside. Back in January 2014, a conversation with Mark Mandel on IRC spurred me to at least put that ages-old draft into Mango Blog so that I'd see it every time I logged in, thinking it might spur me to go through some more blogs and categorize them. For a while it did, but it was a tedious process, visiting each blog (if it still existed), and figuring out whether they mostly blogged about CFML or something else these days and writing up some notes. There are nearly 700 blogs listed on coldfusionbloggers.org and about half of them had ceased to exist in their original form (some were still blogs, some were even still about CFML, but the old RSS feed had gone away so they weren't contributing to the aggregator). I got tired again.

Then this week I decided to write a little code to automate the review process. Due to vagaries in the format of various RSS and Atom feeds, it took me a while to get a viable "parser" working that could segregate blogs into missing, present but no longer parsable, and valid feeds. In deciding to automate the process, I'd decided to give up on the manual review and annotation: I figured that whatever I write will become outdated and having a blog post full of links to outdated material wouldn't be much value. So instead I created a separate HTML page, auto-generated by code, listing the most recent blog post I could determine on every (former) CFML blog that still exists. Of the 250 or so that weren't directly parsable, some have genuinely gone away, replaced by an HTML placeholder for the domain, some have updated their sites and still have an RSS feed but never updated coldfusionbloggers.org (if you're on that list, head over and let Ray Camden know your updated RSS feed!). And then there's nearly 90 that my code couldn't get a response from. I decided to leave links present to all 680 entries so folks can take a look for themselves, and add comments here about changes (but see my note about letting Ray know about updated RSS URLs!). Note that some of the RSS feeds that were unreachable belong to blogs that clearly do still exist! (e.g., Open BlueDragon's blog still exists, but the RSS feed on coldfusionbloggers.org is for openbd.blog-city.com which is offline).

I can run the code and update that page whenever there are significant changes.

June 03, 2014 · By Sean Corfield ·

Sometimes it's very enlightening to look back at the beginning of a project to see how things got set up and how we started down the path that led to where we are today. In this post, I'm going to talk about the first ten tickets we created at World Singles as we kicked off our green field rewrite project five years ago.

May 27, 2014 · By Sean Corfield ·

I don't think I've actually blogged about TeamCFAdvance yet. That's very lax of me. TeamCFAdvance is an initiative started by Denard Springle last year to help foster the development of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) in the CFML community. Yes, there's been several attempts at this in the past. I've been involved with a few of them myself. The Open CFML Foundation is one example, focused on promoting awareness of open source solutions that are written in CFML - reaching out beyond our community. But TeamCFAdvance is very pragmatic: it's aimed directly at our developers, to educate and encourage, to ensure that great projects continue to be maintained, even when their maintainers move on.

If you look at the TeamCFAdvance Github repo you'll see a bunch of projects and there is one you will definitely recognize: BlogCFC! Originally created by Ray Camden, and later stewarded by Scott Stroz, BlogCFC is now a TeamCFAdvance project. One of the things you'll note on that page is the (hopefully!) green "build: passing" icon as we now have BlogCFC hooked into Travis-CI - a Continuous Integration system that automatically runs your test suite after every change, testing the project against Railo (4.0, 4.1, 4.2 beta - soon to be "gold") and Adobe ColdFusion (9.0.2 and 10 on Linux - soon to add 11), using TestBox. There's only a placeholder there right now but expect tests to blossom soon...

To see what's possible once we have everything wired up, take a look at what happens with FW/1's Travis-CI setup with automated tests - 115 of them - that are run on five platform combinations. Almost 120 builds have been tested. FW/1, DI/1, and AOP/1 are all automatically tested.

If you're not already involved with TeamCFAdvance but you're interested in FOSS, sign up! Everyone is welcome!

March 22, 2014 · By Sean Corfield ·

Those wonderful folks over at Packt Publishing are celebrating their 2000th title release and they are offering all their customers a "Buy One, Get One Free" offer on all e-books right now. The offer runs until March 26th and will be applied automatically at check out - and it is unlimited! Great time to stock up on their titles!